Who is Jenna Piscitello? FDNY paramedic viciously bitten on left cheek while treating teen drug-addict
BROOKLYN, NYC: An FDNY EMS veteran was savagely attacked by a crazed teenage girl on Friday, March 6. The teen took a bit out of her face.
Jenna Piscitello was helping a drug-addicted teen onto a stretcher when she went suddenly from being a rescuer to the victim and was attacked in a nightmarish moment where the patient chewed through her left cheek in a disfiguring attack. “I could feel her teeth digging into my flesh,” Piscitello, 28, said as she recovered on Saturday, March 6, in her Staten Island home. “It was almost a stunned feeling... I looked and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, she took a chunk of my face off’.” The teen is charged with assault in the second degree and with intent to cause physical injury.
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Piscitello, who’s been with the FDNY for seven years, admitted the bloody event was “a little traumatizing”. The 28-year-old started her medical career as an EMT and she became a paramedic in 2019.
The attack took place on Friday, March 5, in Brooklyn, after Piscitello and her crew responded to a call for a patient with “altered mental status”. It was reported that a 17-yer-old girl was trying to run out of the house and kept falling.
In an interview with NY Post, Piscitello revealed that the teenager was not threatening until she was put on a stretcher. “She just wrapped her legs around my torso, her arms around my neck and just took a nice big chomp out of my face,” Piscitello recounted. “She was like on me for almost a minute. It felt like an eternity.” She felt the teen “tugging at my face".
“The pain was like insane. I literally felt her teeth going into my flesh. Like a saw just cutting into me.”
At that point, Piscitello didn’t realize how seriously injured she was, and even continued to take care of the girl. Her partner caller an ambulance, after which she got four stitches and is scheduled to see a plastic surgeon on Monday, March 8. Piscitello, a Staten Island resident, added that there was swelling around her eye and that she was still in pain. Two of her FDNY colleagues started a GoFundMe campaign to help her. “I’m definitely going to take my time to recover,” she said. “Emotionally I think I’ll be OK after a few weeks.”
According to her GoFundMe page, "Jenna is one of the most caring, compassionate, and hard-working Paramedics that this department has. To paint a quick picture of what an amazing person she is, Jenna, although bleeding and in considerable pain, continued to work on the patient who assaulted her until she was taken to the hospital. Jenna loves helping people, and we’d love to help her get through this as well."
The page has a goal of $15,000 and has raised $10,968 so far.